PenPals

Inspiration

Many elders and those with disabilities are unable to partake in the world as most young able bodied people are able to; whether that's from lack of knowledge on social medias, anxiety from interacting with people who may not be experienced in socialising with disabled people, or simply being wanting support from people who have gone through the same challenges / know the conditions they suffer from. Having seen first hand the impact of severe physical disability on social interaction and mental health, we believe it necessary for the well being of the isolated to find community and friendship when they most need it.

What it should have done

Our social media like website is a forum for the elderly, disabled, and their carers to find one another, users will be shown the profiles of people that share similar situations, location, and interests in order to connect, offer support, or potentially find a hobby group / people with shared interests. User's will also be able to post events happening in the area or invites to activities (for example, going to the cinema, a board game night, etc). User's will be able to message with other users they have been connected with if they so choose.

How we built it

The back end was built MongoDB and python, with the front end being html and JavaScript. The website was going to be hosted on Google Cloud. The problem however was bringing it all together.

Challenges we ran into

We were too ambitious, so it is clear that the end result will not be as we hoped; however it is still a project worth attempting, and we gave it our best, with better planning I believe we could have succeeded. The bulk of html / profile editting that was needed was more than we expected, and was probably the most nerve wrecking aspect, had we started with this and built up it would have been more manageable.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our database on Mongo was particularly intriguing to put together, and the team member tasked with setting it up did an amazing job with no prior experience which we were particularly happy with.

What we learned

We have learnt the basics to some tools that we hadn't even heard of before, such as Mongo and Flask; similarly, for those more experienced in computer science, there was certainly growth in tying all the aspects of the code together and getting it all to communicate in the desired manner. Although we did not complete the project in the allotted time, we gave it a good shot and tried new things.

Built With

• flask
• geopy
• google-cloud
• html
• javascript
• mondodb
• numpy
• pillow
• pymondo
• python